The Unhappy Medium, page 33
Diego’s spy decided to act. Terrified he’d end up inside the monster himself, he made his excuses and disappeared into town for the day. Frantically, he wrote a horrifying report about La Senza’s machine and sent it to his boss in Zaragoza.
Diego could hardly believe what he was reading. Such a terrible thing seemed impossible. Could La Senza really have such a device? And what of his growing megalomania? It was time to send in the big guns. Off went a deputation led by a high-ranking Cardinal with both Torquemada’s ear and, unusually for the times, a sense of moderation.
After a month it was clear that he’d met with difficulties, writhing in both spiritual and finally material agony within La Senza’s evil mechanism, cooked like braising steak. With La Senza mobilising for an assault on the Aragón heartlands, Diego decided to throw caution to the wind. He went to Torquemada.
The old Inquisitor, bad certainly, but nowhere near as bad as La Senza, listened in cold silence as the details were explained to him. Clearly this time, there was nothing that could be done to protect his one-time favourite. Discreetly, the Inquisition would have to silence this home-grown embarrassment before his sickening deeds became public. The country could turn against them, then all the fun of the autos de fe would have to end. So with his face as blank and as cold as a dead saint, Tomás de Torquemada signed the warrant. For crimes against the Church, for the use of sorcery, for the appropriation of wealth and power by dodgy means as well as the public display of lust and fornication, La Senza was to face the Inquisition himself.
With the decree safely in his hand, Chaplain Diego left the Grand Inquisitor brooding upon his throne and hurried away to arrange the details.
***** *
Out on the road at last, La Senza and his team were in high spirits. During the winter, they had grown bored and restless, longing for a bit of savagery to lighten up the lengthening evenings. They rode high in their saddles as the circus rolled down from the foothills onto the plains below. The horrible machine, its foul design hidden under a covering of oily tarpaulins, edged slowly forward at its maximum speed of a mere two miles a day. Pulled by eight oxen, it creaked on huge wagon wheels along the rutted tracks.
Progress was slow, but after a week of heaving and pulling, the cavalcade finally approached the small town of Bolea. Operating to a plan, Lupero’s men sealed all the town’s exits. Despite whispered advance warnings and the tolling bells, the entire population was still bottled up in dusty houses when La Senza rolled in. The sight of the Inquisitor in his red robes, leather gloves and vestments caused a ripple of terror to course through the town like an electric shock. The Conversos, the Moriscos and just about anyone with a trace of imagination began to wail and gnash their yellowed teeth in fearful anticipation of what was to come.
We know little about what actually happened next because there were no witnesses. Not a one. Not a cat or a dog was left to tell the tale. Chaplain Diego’s spy was patrolling the roads to the south and therefore did not see the slaughter himself. Suffice it to say that when Diego’s men picked up the trail a week later, all they found were the ruts in the ground carved by giant wheels and great clouds of sad dust, picked up and swirled in the air by the fierce Sierra winds. They passed a wasteland of dead villages and hamlets, farms and encampments where there was nothing but dust – no people, no cattle, no horses. No birds were singing and even the cicadas seemed to crouch in mute trauma at La Senza’s horrific passing.
Looking at his maps, Chaplain Diego made a decision. La Senza was obviously moving south, and they would have to cut him off. It was too late to save the villages directly in the Cardinal’s path, but there was just a chance that by crossing wastelands and hills to the south they could swing around La Senza’s course and reach the small market town of Sierra de Luna before the cavalcade arrived. They might even have time to prepare a reception, and so, with the devil himself behind them, they rode .
Sierra de Luna was a happy little place. No one had any idea of what was bearing down upon them along the old pilgrim route to the northeast. As Chaplain Diego rode in with his fifteen men, the locals were yawning and dozing as they always had, oblivious to the impending threat. The mere mention of La Senza brought them to their senses, however, just as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been thrown into their faces. Diego had to think fast. He quickly gathered all the able-bodied men in the town and organised something of a fighting force. He posted lookouts. Mere minutes had passed before the first signal, a glinting reflection from a sword on a distant hill, indicated that La Senza’s ghastly road show was approaching.
Diego’s men melted into the houses.
Stopping short of the town by some three miles, La Senza and his men began their preparations. They halted the machine and their supply train beside an orchard while the advance guard assembled. Then they moved on with the cartload of self-assembly furniture for the auto de fe, a sort of quick-build court-cum-stage with associated Inquisitorial bling. Diego and his men watched from behind the shutters as La Senza, Lupero, Sister María and their entourage rode into the town square, and although the place seemed deserted, a hundred eyes were upon them.
Cardinal La Senza dismounted, removed his gloves and looked on with satisfaction as his underlings began to assemble the auto de fe. Once the stage was ready, he sat down and sipped the wine given to him by the nun. He waved a hand, and at once, Lupero’s men began to fan out in search of victims. Soon they had gathered a crowd of women and children as well as a few thin, weedy adolescents and old men who stood shaking and terrified before the Cardinal.
‘Where are your men?’ he asked eventually, picking at his teeth with a splinter of wood. ‘Tell me?’
‘Www ... we don’t know,’ said an old man, shaking like a fern in a strong gale.
‘Don’t you, don’t you really?’ said La Senza. ‘How about we help your fellow villagers to remember for you?’ With that, he signalled to Lupero, who unsheathed his sword and in one ghastly slick movement separated the old man’s head from his body. The townsfolk gasped in terror and there was a rapid muttering of prayers. ‘Any ideas?’ continued the Inquisitor. ‘Oh come on, don’t be shy. I really haven’t got all day, I still haven’t had my lunch. ’
Behind the shutters, Diego had a tough decision to make. The timing had to be spot on. He had around forty men hidden around the square, twice the number of La Senza’s gang. But these local men were not trained soldiers and things could easily degenerate into a pointless bloodbath. Then again, it was only a matter of time before Lupero’s men searched the buildings with a similar outcome.
It was now or never.
Chaplain Diego burst out on the auto de fe like an avenging storm, his militia beside him. They caught the majority of La Senza’s bodyguards lounging lazily against the walls, laughing at the weak townsfolk with their swords sheathed. Consequently Diego and his men were able to dispatch at least half of them before there could be any real fight-back. But soon there was much flashing of steel as a full-blown skirmish erupted across the square. La Senza and Sister María hid behind the throne on their stage as below them the battle ebbed and flowed, but Diego’s men won the day. Soon, Lupero’s bloodied men began to scatter away or lay dying upon the cobbles. Perched above the townsfolk in their ludicrous little theatre, La Senza and the nun hissed defiantly at their tormentors like cornered rats. Lupero himself, separated from his master across the square, thought better of the fight and dashed inside a merchant’s house, making his way to a rooftop where he could witness the end of his idol. La Senza could do nothing as the locals, laughing and cackling, pulled at the flimsy stage. In no time at all, it collapsed to the ground in a mess of splinters, dust and vestments, sending the Inquisitor and his fearsome acolyte tumbling. Sister María defiantly clawed at the mob as they closed in upon her lover but she inevitably paid with her life; spliced in two by a well-handled scythe, she slumped bloody to the ground and was trampled underfoot. La Senza, however, was denied a mercifully fast dispatch. He was dragged like a wild animal to the centre of the square and the mob, blood in their nostrils, cleared briefly to make a circle. At bay, the crimson Cardinal turned and snarled at his tormentors.
They began.
A hundred hands pulled and tore at the Inquisitor’s arms and legs, his fingers and his hair. All began to separate like a lobster dinner. The bloody tatters flew high above the crowd and bit-by-hideous-bit, he was ripped, quite literally, to shreds.
Above on the rooftop, Lupero was in tears of frustration and anger. His great master, the evil, vile La Senza, was now nothing more than a big mess of body parts and torn red cloth. Lupero had promised the Inquisitor that he would protect him, or preserve him, and yet here he was unable to do either. Powerless, he watched the bloody display run its course. Then he was horrified to see one of the town’s mangy dogs rush into the fray and re-emerge seconds later with his master’s disembodied hand. The mob, knee deep in bloodlust, was oblivious to the dog as it ran away, keen to dine on La Senza’s hand at its leisure. Suddenly, Lupero came to his senses and remembered his master’s instructions: ‘Should I ever be killed in action, you must preserve of me some reliquaries, for now I know that I cannot and must not die. Some part of my physical being must be taken, hidden and you shall await the instructions for my return.’
Galvanised, La Senza’s dark lieutenant jumped from the roof into an alleyway, landing heavily, wincing in pain. Then, hobbling, he dashed after the opportunistic mutt, his bloodied and broken body hurting badly as he raced to keep the dog in view. The dog was having none of it. It dashed and weaved through the grubby back streets with a defiant purpose. Far from the shouting and yelling of the square, they broke out into a backyard and the dog, cornered in a pigsty, dropped La Senza’s mangled hand with its rings and rubies before snarling back at Lupero.
Like most people, he tried the ‘good doggy’ approach first. But the dog had heard that one before, so as soon as Lupero tried to reach for La Senza’s severed hand, the hound bit hard into his leather glove and he screamed in agony. Wasting no more time on dog whispering, he stabbed the mutt into a violent silence, grabbed the hand and stuffed it into his jacket. After a desperate search in the surrounding scrub, he found a tethered horse and struck out for the encampment.
As he tore into the camp in a cloud of dust, Lupero ordered La Senza’s remaining team to move out. However, the unexpected news of their master’s death, proven by the bloody hand of the Inquisitor himself, caused an immediate switch in loyalties. With the head of the snake removed from its body, base opportunism quickly surfaced and most of the men rode for the hills, unfortunately including Chaplain Diego’s agent. Consequently, what happened next remains something of a mystery.
Probably, it was all that Lupero could do to keep order and ensure that La Senza’s machine could be moved. He’d have wasted no time making his reduced manpower heave the behemoth back onto the road. The oxen would have been whipped into a frantic pace. Likely, Lupero left the main roads with the now-mouldering remains of La Senza still inside his jacket, then hid in the mountains as Diego’s men scoured the countryside. All this was mere conjecture.
******
‘That is the story, Dr Barlow,’ said Diego heavily. ‘We never recovered the machine, never found Lupero and we never found the Inquisitor’s hand. There is, however, a lead – a small one maybe, but a lead nonetheless.’
‘Which is?’ asked Newton.
‘A woodcarver from Carcassonne, over the border in France. Swore under oath that he had done five carvings for a man called Lupero a month after La Senza died. He says he saw the hand and filled the boxes with the fingers.’
‘Fingers? Is that all he said?’
‘Sadly he went missing, probably murdered,’ Diego sighed. ‘We just don’t know. But the trail went cold. We stopped him Dr Barlow, but that’s all we did. The machine is still out there – the five boxes have clearly been activated and La Senza is back, ready to start where he left off. But this time, he knows about everything, and he’ll be coming for us. He’ll wipe out our relics and God knows what else.’ Eric the Greek began to whimper, rocking back and forth as Diego let the idea sink in.
‘It’s obvious he has help,’ said Jameson. ‘But as to who, and why, well, we have no idea. Right now La Senza could be anywhere.’
‘Blimey,’ said Newton.’ That’s not much to go on is it? There’s no codes, nothing but a search on foot, are you sure I’m your man?’
‘Trust me, we’ve got everyone on it,’ said Jameson. ‘If La Senza gets that damn thing back out there then we’ve got a real nightmare on our hands. This guy knows how everything works, all the dead–living stuff, all the magic, all the spells, all the tricks of the trade. And he’s equipped with a 500-year-old mincing machine that could wipe out every single good guy in Purgatory. Trust me, he’ll be coming for us all. And if he succeeds, Dr Barlow, it will literally be hell on earth.’
‘You’re going to have to give me more chaps, any details, however small – I need them.’ Newton thought for a second looking at his meagre notes. ‘The boxes, tell me about the boxes – what are they like?’
‘The description is poor, I’m afraid,’ said Jameson. ‘Something about La Senza crouching in his robes, that’s about it. They only contain his fingers, so probably we can guess they’re about six inches high, max. I’ll have the art department send you a sketch.’
Newton’s head began to whir and pop, the neurons firing and fizzing as he began testing all the combinations, looking for openings and connections within what he had been told so far. There wasn’t much to go on but the challenge, well that was certainly there.
‘Well, do you think you can do it?’ asked Alex, strangely sullen.
‘I’ll have a bloody good go,’ said Dr Newton Barlow, snapping his notepad shut.
CHAPTER 28 – Amongst u s
Cardinal La Senza glared out from within the body of Christopher Baxter, stray ripples of purple plasma drifting lazily off him towards the vaulted ceiling.
‘My great Inquisitor!’ fawned Van Loop senior, a distant descendant of La Senza’s loyal medieval lieutenant Lupero. ‘We have waited so long to see you return!’
‘You’ve waited?!’ snarled La Senza. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing? Making tortillas?’
‘My deepest apologies, my Lord. But it has taken so many generations to release you from your tormentors. How could those beasts do that to you?’
‘Yes, it was a bit annoying,’ hissed La Senza. He leered at the gathered followers. ‘Who are these idiots?’
‘Why, my great Inquisitor,’ offered Van Loop, ‘these are the devoted ones who have waited for you all these years. It is these people who have kept your name alive when the forces of good sought to wipe you from our memories.’
‘Do you want me to thank you or something?’ said La Senza, tidying his nails nonchalantly. ‘Because I’m not going to.’
‘Wow, he really is horrible!’ said an admiring voice from the pews. La Senza’s eyes darted toward a balding sweaty man holding two brass candelabra.
‘You, what did you say?’ asked the Cardinal.
‘Err, I was just saying how unpleasant you are, oh great La Senza,’ continued the man, oblivious to the outcome. The room froze.
‘Kill him,’ said La Senza, idly.
‘What? Really?’ said Van Loop. ‘I mean really ?’
‘Yes really, I’m your master, am I not?’
‘Well yes ... It’s just that ...’
‘Well kill him then, or I’ll have someone kill you.’
‘But I meant it in a good way!’ said the sweaty man, frantically scanning the room for back-up. It was not forthcoming. Gunter signalled and the man was dragged away, loudly protesting his loyalty. Abruptly, the begging was silenced.
‘That’s the spirit,’ said La Senza. ‘Now, you, Van Loop, tell me, what are my teeth like?’
‘Perfect my Lord, like little white mice!’
‘Excellent!’ said La Senza. ‘Nothing worse than lax dental hygiene. I have had people burnt for less.’ La Senza glanced around as everyone made doubly sure they had closed their mouths. His gaze fell upon the McCauleys. ‘Who are these three fools?’ said La Senza, dismissively. ‘Are they jesters? I can’t stand jesters, you should know that.’
‘No Cardinal, these are our hosts in this great endeavour. May I introduce the three McCauley brothers – Ascot, Epsom and Plumpton.’
‘Well they look like jesters. What are you, triplets? Three jesters for the price of one.’ La Senza narrowed his eyes and stared at Ascot. ‘You’ll be the dimwits who’ve arranged this little party,’ he scowled. ‘Out for personal gain, furnishing your own needs at the expense of others? I can respect that.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Ascot, wringing his hands like a funeral director. ‘It is purely a business relationship, Cardinal, although I trust it shall be a matter of some mutual benefit.’
‘Mmm,’ said La Senza. ‘Well it had better be, because a contract that does not suit Cardinal Balthazar De La Senza will almost certainly end in screaming and damp towels.’ He sat back in his chair, suddenly weary, and took a deep long breath. ‘But,’ La Senza continued, ‘I am too weakened by the ritual of possession to discuss such tawdry matters.’ He waved Ascot away like a waiter.
‘As you wish,’ said Ascot, bowing.
‘Oooh hold on,’ said the Cardinal standing suddenly. ‘Who is this ? Come forward child, let me see you.’ Nervously, Miss Dryer emerged from behind her employer. La Senza, his dressing gown open to reveal his loincloth, sensuously wove towards her.
